Review: ‘69 positions’ Explores the Sexual Politics in Performance

About halfway through “69 positions,” at MoMA PS1 on Friday, the choreographer Mette Ingvartsen, naked except for socks and sneakers, addressed her audience with a personal question: “Would anyone be interested in having a multiple collective orgasm?”

In any other public context, that might have been startling. But it was one of many such intimate proposals in Ms. Ingvartsen’s admirably ambitious, audacious lecture-performance on sexuality, brought to the museum’s geodesic dome as part of the American Realness festival.

Over two hours, Ms. Ingvartsen, a Danish-born artist, explored the notion of sex as a social rather than a private phenomenon, offering what she called a “guided tour” of sexual politics in performance. We witnessed — and participated in — her re-enactments of Carolee Schneemann’s “Meat Joy” (1964), Anna Halprin’s “Parades and Changes” (1965), the Performance Group’s “Dionysus in 69” (1968) and Yayoi Kusama’s naked protest outside the New York Stock Exchange (1968). Skipping ahead to her own examinations of nudity, pleasure and desire, she invited us to restage, among other scenarios, an “orgasm chorus” from her 2005 work “to come.” The third and final section grew increasingly strange, as she teased out the erotic properties of inanimate objects: a lamp, a desk, an imagined marble statue.

These adventures were not for the shy audience member, and as we flocked through the bright white space, framed by a spare exhibition of archival materials — posters, books, photos, videos — the crowd didn’t always seem as game as our guide might have wished. When she playfully swiped my notebook during a celebratory dance from “Dionysus” — an invitation to dance with her — I wasn’t quite ready to let my public and private selves ecstatically, unself-consciously merge.

I was more moved by Ms. Ingvartsen’s own navigation of multiple selves: her swift, lucid transitions between docent and dancer, between clinically explaining and viscerally doing, as she both commented on and reincarnated the past. In her smart rehashing of “Meat Joy” — best remembered as an orgy of human bodies and raw meat — her precisely chosen actions and words, including an amusing and illuminating email exchange with Ms. Schneemann, rivaled the video on view for taking us back to 1964.

Ms. Ingvartsen could have burrowed more deeply into a few ideas rather than jumping among so many. Yet there was electricity in the work’s mutability, right up through the finale, when she emerged from a gyrating, climactic encounter with a chair to calmly wish us a pleasurable evening.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Exploring the Sexual Politics in Performance. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe